Well, this is an interesting turn of events.

One of the motivations behind starting split-the-bill.com was too learn the ins and outs of running a web 2.0 startup. In this day and age the Cloud offers a fantastic ability for one to take a product to market with minimal investment and amazing speed.

To give you some idea: split-the-bill.com uses Google Apps standard for email, Posterous for this blog and Rackspace Cloud for our web servers. All told it took less the 2 hrs to setup all this infrastructure and it has (currently) a running cost of less then $50 a month.

Of course there is a downside which worries companies using the Cloud, what happens when it breaks?

This is what has just happened to our server at Rackspace Cloud. About half an hour or so ago siteuptime.com reported that one of our Rackspace Cloud based servers was down. After a bit of investigation we found that the server could not be accessed and neither could the split-the-bill.com server !

Worse yet the Rackspace admin console throws up an error when you try to view your server status and it also fails when you try raise a support ticket, which is all rather ironic. Their live chat was also overloaded but did eventually returned a canned response that basically said: "we have a problem, it effects all data centers, we don't know what it is, we are looking into it". They also direct you to monitor their status site: http://status.rackspacecloud.com/

So one day in and the site is down.... not a good start